


You Put Your Arms Around Me

by itsavolcano



Series: The Framework Cannot Stop True Love (All It Can Do Is Delay It for a While) [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, post 4x15
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-10
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-10-01 23:05:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10202852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsavolcano/pseuds/itsavolcano
Summary: Jemma Simmons is desperate.An unexpected addition to "And I Remember Every Kiss" from Jemma's POV set between attempt 12 and 13.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to dilkirani for the beta!!

_ My mind is slowly creating a link _  
_From your mouth speaks your lovely voice_  
_The softest words ever spoken_  
_"What's broken can always be fixed_  
_What's fixed will always be broken"_

 

**12.5**

“I need you to be prepared,” Jemma speaks and her chin trembles. She bites her tongue to keep the tears from spilling down her cheeks. She doesn’t understand why, if they’re in some simulation, she can cry. No doubt, Fitz would have an explanation ready, relating it to how people experience panic and stress when dreaming but she can't think about that now.

Daisy only watches her, waiting until she can finish her sentence. Again, she takes a breath, pushes the words past her teeth.

“If I can’t get to Fitz, if he won’t snap out of whatever this is, then I need you to be prepared to take the others to the programmed backdoor without me.” She inhales, shakily. “Without _us_.”

“What?” Her friend only gapes at her, wide eyes quickly furrowing in confusion. “No, that’s not an option. We’ll get Fitz back. We’re all going back.” 

“Daisy, it’s taking too long. We need to be logical.” She hopes she sounds stronger than she feels.

“Logical? Like running through a mainframe controlled by a psycho murderbot in a secret bunker?” Daisy cuts her a look. “Simmons, I think we left logical back in another dimension.”

Under other circumstances, Jemma would laugh at the absurdity but she’s too wrung out, now. 

In theory, if they manage to wake one member of their team, manage to make one person cognizant that this reality they’re experiencing is nothing more than ones and zeros programmed by a machine having an existential crisis via an evil textbook, well, then, they should be able to take the Zephyr to the hostage location and rescue the remaining team members at the source.

But before going under, Daisy and Jemma agreed they didn’t want to risk it. They didn’t want to leave overpowering Aida and any of the remaining LMDs to fate. If anything happened in the strike and the synthesizers were disconnected incorrectly, their team members would be trapped in the mainframe permanently while their bodies died.

The only way to ensure a successful rescue is to bring their team members into awareness within the Framework. Without any of Aida’s avatars realizing it. Although, truthfully, Aida’s avatars are the least of Jemma’s concern. 

Initially, she believed they should break out Fitz first. However, after several missed encounters—almost as if some omnipotent force were preventing her getting too close, keeping him from even noticing her—they created a glitch in the system. It trapped Fitz within one moment, one morning of his synthetic life as he swaggered into his pristine office at the top of his gilded tower. 

The first few times Jemma approached him in this repeated morning, she’d found this version of Fitz somewhat amusing. By the third time, it broke her heart to see him so openly confident—to the point of being too cocky. Jemma always believed Fitz was brilliant, and while he knew he was smart (a PhD by seventeen otherwise impossible), in the Framework he wasn’t bogged down by the cutting words of his father, by the lasting effects of a brain injury sustained when saving her. Here, he is a whole man, his full potential. Here, they’d never met. How could they, when Jemma Anne Simmons is six feet in the ground?

This world isn’t real, but it is becoming more and more difficult to remember the life outside of the Framework. Her true memories are growing fuzzy and hard to distinguish, white noise barely noticed in the background. Pressing her eyes shut, Jemma remembers the way her face fits perfectly against his shoulder, the way he curls around her in the early morning light, the way he holds her fingers as long as he can, when she is rushing between meetings and promising to make time for him later. How stupid, she thinks, to assume time would wait for them. 

Now, when she approaches him—twelve failed attempts to snap him out of this programming—he looks at her with vacant eyes and it cuts through her. It has been so long since the man who loves her has looked at her that she isn’t certain how long she can take. Like Orpheus, she is willing to bargain to get her love back in the world of the living. But there are moments when she worries about the risk. Is she willing to chance fate, to lose him to the darkness?

Is she willing to wake up on the Zephyr knowing he is lost to her? Jemma knows the truth; she’s lived it once, twice before.

“I cannot go back there without him.” She is crying now, openly and without control. Her sobs wrack through her with such an intensity she practically hyperventilates and once more thinks how cruel this virtual world is to leave her feeling every emotion with such a visceral intensity. But then she and Daisy are anomalies in the mainframe, having forced this world to adapt to _them_ on _their_ terms, so of course it would find a way to retaliate like a host trying to destroy an infection. 

It is trying to break her.

It is working.

“Jemma, we’ve only just started trying to get to Fitz. I know knocking him out didn’t work, but _something_ will.” Daisy steps to her but she flinches away from her touch. She doesn’t want to be consoled. She wants to breath fire. She wants to rip the man she loves from this hell. 

But if she can’t, she would rather stay within this simulation. She would rather be a ghost watching from the shadows of programmed trees as he smiles at various news reporters, as his photo splashes across front pages of various magazines and periodicals. 

This phantom life where he has no memory of her is more appealing than the crushing awareness that comes with each morning, knowing he is lost to her forever. She has already lived that life with only his voicemails and photo to soothe, her heart breaking at the promise of dinner, of _something more_. Now, she knows the taste of his kisses, the caress of his hands against her hips as he pulls her against him. Now, he has trailed his lips over her skin, mapping her freckles like his favorite constellations.

She cannot go back to that reality without him. Here, she is forever waking from a dream, fragments of a past life mixing with a distorted fantasy. 

But after spending the better part of a year pulling Daisy back from the edge of self-destruction, how can she then convince her to leave them behind? 

Jemma takes a breath, more from muscle memory than biological necessity, and Daisy only watches her before finally speaking. 

“I meant what I said. This isn’t the end of your story. C’mon, after all this time?—And I’m talking, what over a decade—you’re just going to give up?” 

Daisy is trying to work her up, to create a spark that will grow from an ember into a fire.

It is working.

“We aren’t some fairytale bedtime story.” She glares but the dried tears on her cheeks make it difficult, make her skin pull in another cruelly realistic aspect of the simulation. 

“No?” Her friend raises an insufferably smug eyebrow. “I plan on telling your kids all about the story of two nerdy scientists and their happily ever after. Might leave out some of that weird sciency foreplay but I’d definitely mention the true love’s kiss. Isn’t that what it’s all about?”

Daisy is rambling now, trying to calm and distract Jemma. She knows her tricks. But an idea takes shape, a hypothesis she suddenly needs to test. 

“A kiss?” Could it be that simple? She turns back around and knows she now looks just as smug. Daisy stops, studies her, no doubt confused by the gleam in her eye.

Maybe that’s been the problem all along. She’s spent too much time approaching him, laying the groundwork to ease him into a revelation only to have the time loop rip them apart. 

She has a collection of past data on her side and he is, after all, a scientist—what better way to approach a scientist than with a hypothesis in need of proving?

And if her theory fails, then at least she’ll have another memory, one last kiss.

It is time for the direct approach.

__

_You put your arms around me  
You put your arms around me _

  
  


(Lyrics from “You Put Your Arms Around Me” by Jens Lekman)


End file.
